Teancum (3 page)

“Jebus,” Coltrane muttered.
 
“Heaven help Chicago.”

“Or us,” Rockwell offered.
 
“There’s no guarantee he’s planning to attack a
Gentile
city.”

A pall of silence settled over the carriage.

The Striders turned north.
 
They tramped through the foothills above the farms now, so
there weren’t any more ditches or fences to jump or sheds to avoid.
 
Mule deer scattered at the Striders’
approach, and dog-like creatures that might have been coyotes.

“What was your offer, then, Mr. Clemens?” Brigham Young
asked.
 
His voice sounded
deliberately cheerful.

“Excuse me?”

“I can guess what the English had to offer,” Young
said.
 
“And the secessionists, for
that matter—either of them might have offered me land, to the north or
south of my Kingdom, that would have been very valuable.
 
But I don’t want the Wyoming
Territory.”

“Who does?”
 
Sam
agreed.
 
“But what about Colorado,
with its silver fields?”

“Is that the Union’s offer, then?” Young asked.
 
“Join with us to prevent secession, and
you can have the silver of the Rocky Mountains?
 
Couldn’t I get the same thing from the southern states, in
the event of their victory?”

“You certainly could,” Sam conceded, “and the victorious
United States could offer you land all the way from St. George to Mexico, so
land promises are cheap.
 
Which is why
the Union didn’t send me to promise you land.”

“No?” Rockwell sounded curious.

“No,” Sam continued, “my offer is one trainload of
fornication pants, sizes to be specified by a duly appointed agent of the
Kingdom.”

Young snorted, then began to laugh.
 

“I don’t mind fornication pants myself,” Rockwell said,
shrugging, as Young continued to guffaw.
 
“The buttons up the front make it easier to empty your bladder quick,
and sometimes that can be a real advantage.”

“Urination trousers.”
 
Sam grinned, knowing that he was reeling them in.
 
He was, after all, still on a
diplomatic mission, and when the evening’s crisis was over, whoever was still
standing in the Lion House would have to make a decision about the war.
 
“Micturition leggings, if you prefer.”

“Pissing pants!” Rockwell barked, and he started laughing,
too.

The dwarf just shook his head like he thought everyone
around him was crazy.

“All pants to be delivered by train to the Great Salt Lake
City,” Sam finished.
 
He jabbed an
imaginary cigar at Young’s chest for emphasis.
 
“On the new Transcontinental Railroad, one hundred percent
owned and operated by the Kingdom of Deseret.”

Young stopped laughing.

“All land to be provided and all track laid at the expense
of the United States government,” Sam added.
 
“Along with rolling stock up to five million dollars in
value, complete training in railroad operations for up to two hundred persons
of your choice, and a ten year maintenance guarantee for the entire length of
the track.”

“President Buchanan really wants me in the war on his side,”
Young observed.

“President Buchanan really doesn’t want a war at all,” Sam
disagreed.
 
“And he thinks that the
best way to avoid one is to have the Kingdom of Deseret on his side from the
beginning.”

“Patrolling the skies over Richmond and Atlanta,” Young
guessed.

Sam shrugged.
 
“If need be.
 
Maybe simple
telegraph messages from you to Richmond and Atlanta would suffice.”

“The telegraph doesn’t connect to Salt Lake yet,” Young
pointed out.

“Oh, did I forget that part?” Sam asked coyly.
 
“Of course we’d connect the Great Salt
Lake City to the American telegraph network very first.
 
I’m told it could be done in a matter
of mere weeks.”

Young was silent for a minute.
 
Sam leaned into the cool dry air of the night, feeling his
hair ruffle and imagining himself as the victorious figurehead on the prow of a
mighty ship of state.

“Your gift is something of a Trojan horse,” Young finally
said.

“I missed the part about the horses,” Rockwell grunted.
 
“How many horses?”

“The United States has no interest in infringing on the
sovereignty of the Kingdom of Deseret,” Sam said quickly.
 
“The railroad would carry no troops,
unless you wanted them.”

“I’m not worried about guns.”

“What, then?
 
Fornication pants?”

“Yes,” Young snapped, “fornication pants!
 
And southern cotton, and French wine,
and Virginia tobacco, and manufactured goods from the mills of the north!
 
And anything else that would make my
people soft, and weak, and dependent on a Gentile for anything!”

Sam rocked back on his heels.
 
“That’s commerce, Mr. President,” he said.
 
“We’re all dependent on each
other.”
 
He gestured down at the
valley below.
 
“You could trade
your sugar beets, your wheat, and whatever else you grow, make or dig out of
these mountains, and get the things your people want.”

“What they
want
,
maybe.
 
But I can’t get in trade
the things my people
need
,” Young
growled.
 
“Independence.
 
Pride.
 
Freedom from persecution.
  
Open borders and commerce work very well, Mr. Clemens,
when you are a powerful people with wealth.
 
They’re not nearly as useful to a small, persecuted folk
like us.”

“You’re afraid of persecution?” Sam asked, slightly
mystified.
 
“It’d be
your
railroad, you could decide who rides it and who has
to walk!
 
How would you be any
worse off than you are today?”

“I do worry about persecution,” Young admitted, and he
pounded the side of the Strider’s carriage with his balled fist.
 
“And I am right to do so!
 
More than Gentile bullets, though, or
Gentile tar and feathers, I worry about Gentile trade goods.
 
I worry about my children and
grandchildren, and the seductive power of material things.
 
The first step on the road is
fornication pants, Mr. Clemens.
 
The second is fornication.
 
And at the end of that path, my people will cease to exist, not because
they have been murdered, but because they have become your people, and snuffed
out their own unique lamps to do so.”

Sam opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say, and
closed it again.

As the Striders dropped out of the foothills, past the first
tall Franklin Poles and into the outskirts of the Great Salt Lake City where
Sam’s steam-truck waited, Sam began to hear gunshots.
 
Sam tried not to think about who was shooting whom, and
prepared to switch vehicles.

The lot where the
Jim Smiley
was berthed was unattended and the gate locked, but from the height of
the Strider’s carriage, Sam found he could easily step onto the broad top of
the plascrete wall surrounding the lot, and from there it was a short jump onto
the steam-truck’s deck.

“The gate’s locked,” Young bristled as Sam stepped across
the gap and onto the plascrete.

“I’ll pay for all the damages,” Sam acknowledged, and paced
to his left, looking for the shortest possible jump.

“Wait for me,” Young barked, and scrambled after him.
 
On the wall, he straightened his jacket
and nodded to the Strider’s pilot.
 
“No offense, Private Ramirez.
 
Your skills are impeccable, I’m sure, but the ride is a little bumpy.”

The Striderman saluted, and Rockwell and Jed Coltrane
followed Brigham Young up onto the wall.

“Shall we lead the way dow to the Liod House?” Absalom
Fearnley-Standish called from the other Strider.

Sam looked at the exhaust pipe and saw, of course, no
smoke.
 
“It’ll take us a few
minutes to have her going!” he called.
 
“Keep an eye on the street!”

He jumped down to the metal deck of his craft, landing
softly on his rubber soles and rolling forward on bent knees.
 
He had spirits in the galley that would
get the fire started quickly, but of course the fire would take time to heat
the boiler and build up enough steam to move the
Jim Smiley’s
tyres.

Which was why Sam had had the
Smiley
built with a special emergency starter, an
electricks device the engineers had built to his specifications that basically
hurled lightning bolts through the boiler to superheat its contents in just a
few seconds.
 
He flicked the switch
on in the wheelhouse, hearing two heavy thuds on the deck behind him as he did
so, and headed below decks as the dwarf Coltrane dropped onto the
Jim
Smiley
with a tumbling flip, landing on his
feet without a sound.

Sam heard the electricks of the emergency starter hum as he
hit the engine room.
 
He checked
the water levels, saw the rising pressure gauge with satisfaction, and was
happy that the Danites weren’t as sabotage-minded as Captain Richard Burton.
 
He was even happier that he’d talked
the United States Army into equipping the
Jim Smiley
with the biggest electric battery on wheels in North
America, if not the world.
 
It
would take a week of normal driving to recharge, but this was exactly the sort
of emergency he’d in mind.
 
Well,
maybe not
exactly
.

He ducked into the galley for a bottle of something
flammable and a fistful of cigars.

Coltrane trotted down the stairs as Sam threw a bottle of
high-proof whisky into the furnace.
 
The little man rolled up his sleeves and nodded.

“I shoveled a lotta elephant shit,” he said.
 
“I figure I can shovel coal.”

“It might make a nice change,” Sam agreed, biting on his
Cohiba with a sense of cosmic relief.
 
He handed the dwarf a cigar too, struck a match, lit Coltrane’s smoke,
and then tossed the match into the furnace.

Poof!

Sam checked the pressure gauge again.
 
“Here we go,” he told Coltrane, and
headed up to the wheelhouse.
 
“Join
us when the furnace is full.”

Sam gestured at the co-pilot’s chair inside the wheelhouse,
but Rockwell and Young both declined to sit.
 
He happily released the brake and put the
Jim Smiley
into gear, backing away from the parking lot gate in
order to have as much of a run at it as possible.

He wasn’t sure, but he thought the gunshots sounded closer.

*
  
*
  
*

KRANG-NG-NG-NG!

The piles of coal in the boiler room’s boxes jumped like
popping corn in the pan and Jed tumbled to the hard metal floor.

“Ouch.
 
You’re
getting old, Coltrane,” he muttered to himself, rubbing a bruised elbow as he
stood back up.
 
He shoveled coal
into the boiler until it wouldn’t take any more, then he shut the grate, jammed
the shovel into a convenient coalbox, and headed back up the stairs to the
deck.

He heard trouble brewing in the gunshots, and he patted the
vibro-blade at his belt to reassure himself.

The
Jim Smiley
rolled
down the empty streets of the Great Salt Lake City.
 
Jed emerged from below decks facing backward, and saw one of
the two Mexican Striders, bringing up the rear of the little procession.
 
They seemed to be slowing down, and so
did Sam Clemens’s steam-truck.

Jed turned around.
 
Ahead, he saw the curving lower side of the big egg-shaped Tabernacle,
and the other Strider, leading the way.
 
Absalom Fearnley-Standish and his girlfriend rode in it, and as Jed
looked at him the Englishman took off his mutilated hat and waved it back in
salute.

Beyond Fearnley-Standish, around the base of the egg, Jed
saw war.
 
He moved forward into the
wheelhouse to see it better.

A large brick building of some kind, like a storefront,
faced the Tabernacle.
 
Twin rows of
three-foot-high brass letters decorated its façade, one in the strange Mormon
gobbledygook they called
Deseret
and the
other in English, reading
ZIONS COOPERATIVE MERCANTILE INSTITUTE
.

Most of the windows had been shot out of the front of the
building, leaving the street littered with glass and fragments of wood, and
bodies, in both blue and gray uniforms.
 
A flag Jed didn’t recognize flew over the battered Institute, blue and
gold and showing an Indian holding a bow and a single white star.
 
Men in blue uniforms crouched inside,
showing themselves only to fire carbines at their besiegers.
 

The soldiers outside the Institute wore gray.
 
They advanced in ranks upon the men in
blue, crouching behind Franklin poles and carriages, and creeping up in tandem
with their metallic clocksprung horses, the horses shuffling low to the ground
in postures impossible to flesh and blood animals, providing their riders cover
with their heavy gleaming bodies.